Today’s Layout
A bit about me…
Ph.D. in Statistics from Montana State University
“Supporting Data-Intensive Environmental Science Research: Data Science Skills for Scientific Practitioners of Statistics”
Qualitative Research
“Qualitative researchers strive to understand the meaning people have constructed about their world and their experiences.” (Merriam 2002)
“Qualitative research is an effort to understand situations in their uniqueness as part of a particular context and the interactions there. This understanding is an end in itself.” (Patton 1990)
What are the principles of qualitative research?
The researcher is the primary instrument for data collection and data analysis
The analysis seeks to find emerging themes
The product of a qualitative study is richly descriptive
How might this look?
Sample Selection
Select a sample from which the most can be learned!
Data Collection
Major sources of data – interviews, observations, documents
Data Analysis
Compares units of data to find common patterns across the data
Investigating Student Learning through Code
Warm-up (90 seconds)
Name one thing you look for in someone’s code to determine if they are a “good” programmer.
How can we “distinguish merely interesting learning from effective learning” (Wiggins and McTighe 2005)?
Investigating Power in the Classroom
Another Warm-up 🙃
Choose one word that summarizes how you felt the last time you collaborated in a group.
“The more one talks and the less one listens, the more likely it is that one’s viewpoint will function as if it were community consensus even if it is not” (Montell 2019).
Gee perspective
Influence framework perspective
verbs for actions(Theobold and Williams 2022)
promotions / demotions
What can group work teach us about oral exams?(Theobold 2021)
Questions?